


Something

by Augustus



Category: Malory Towers - Enid Blyton
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-06-15
Updated: 2003-06-15
Packaged: 2018-03-11 12:24:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3327086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Augustus/pseuds/Augustus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anything is better than nothing at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Something

**Author's Note:**

> Challenge: Snowdome’s improv – rock, kid, cherry, rain  
> Chronology: Set just after “First Term at Malory Towers”. The girls are very underage, but it really isn’t an issue for this piece of fluff.  
> Author’s notes: I heart Gwendoline. This was originally supposed to be a Mary-Lou POV, but somehow the Gwen voice is a lot stronger inside my head. Hee. Funny, that…  
> Dedicated to: Kanna-Ophelia – for being a fantastic writer and a wonderful friend. And for inspiring me in so many ways – not all of them to do with writing *hugs*

“Forty-eight… forty-nine…” Gwendoline had grown quite adept at listening to the other girls while appearing as though she was quite disinterested in their bedtime chatter. She had reached the stage where she could count a hundred strokes of her hairbrush aloud, even as she concentrated on hearing every word of their irritating conversation. “Sixty-three… sixty-four…”

“I tell you,” Irene was insisting, “it’s true. I heard Mr. Young saying so to Mam’zelle Dupont when I was practising in the music room this afternoon. Apparently he’s tall and rather handsome and drives a very impressive car.”

“Who would have thought?” Darrell leaned in a little closer, her legs tucked up underneath her as she sat, entranced, at the end of Irene’s bed. “Potty and a mysterious male caller…”

“He must be her boyfriend.” Alicia’s tone was matter-of-fact. As the other girls turned to face her, she shrugged, as though it was the most natural thing in the world for a house-mistress to have a secret beau. “She’s not entirely ancient, after all.”

Darrell clasped her hands together, delighted with the revelation. “Perhaps they’ll get married. If we’re all invited to the wedding, we might even be allowed to miss a day’s lessons.”

“I highly doubt that she’d appreciate a church full of students,” Gwendoline remarked disdainfully, quite forgetting that she was trying not to show any interest in the conversation. Leaving her hairbrush beside the mirror, she moved over to join the other girls. “Why, I should think that would be the last thing she’d want.”

“Not everyone is as spiteful as you,” Alicia replied calmly.

Scowling, Gwendoline turned and made her way over to her bed. She didn’t care what Alicia thought about her; in Gwendoline’s opinion, she’d much prefer to have no friends at all than to associate with such a coarse and opinionated girl. Turning down her blankets, Gwendoline slid beneath the covers, burrowing deep beneath their warm weight and pointedly closing her eyes against the other first formers. 

“She’s sulking now, I expect.” Even with her eyes closed, Gwendoline could picture Alicia’s face, her eyes bright with smug amusement.

“Leave her be.” Gwendoline recognised the calmly authoritative voice of Katherine, the head of their dormy. “She only says such things to cause a stir."

Biting back the urge to defend herself, Gwendoline remained silent in her bed, refusing to acknowledge their hateful remarks. Her eyes were so tightly closed that she was beginning to see cherry-coloured sparks behind her eyelids and a dull, irritable ache was rising in her temples. If only the other girls didn’t make her feel so impotent at times, she felt sure that she would find her time at Malory Towers to be much less of a trial. There was little fun in always being outnumbered in an argument, as Gwendoline had discovered within her first week at the school. Most of the time, it was easier to remain quiet and to sneer at their friendships in private.

A few weeks earlier, Gwendoline might have stood her ground, confident in the knowledge that she would later be able to link arms with Mary-Lou and usher her into a corner to seethe about Darrell’s temper and Alicia’s sharp tongue and patronising expressions. Once her tricks had been found out, however, that form of release had been lost to Gwendoline and she was left to scowl in silence or to complain bitterly about the other girls in her slap-dash letters home to her mother and Miss Winter.

“I wonder if we’ll ever meet him,” Jean mused, her brisk, Scottish accent echoing loudly in the large room. “Potty’s a good sort, really. I should think that we’d like any boyfriend of hers.”

“It’s so horribly grown up, though, isn’t it?” As Mary-Lou spoke, Gwendoline rolled over slightly so that she could occasionally sneak a peek through her eyelashes at her fellow first formers. Mary-Lou’s eyes were wide with timid admiration, Gwendoline discovered, as she offered her contribution to the discussion. “Just imagine. A proper boyfriend!”

“Miss Potts is grown up,” Darrell laughed. 

Mary-Lou blushed. “I know. I just don’t think of our teachers as having boyfriends. They’re… teachers.” The colour in her cheeks deepened as she tried to put her thoughts into words. “It seems quite… peculiar.”

“I shouldn’t like to be a teacher in a girls’ school.” Irene frowned in concentration as she manipulated her hair into a tight braid, ready for bed. “Why, imagine being surrounded only by women for an entire term at a time. I should think it would be nearly impossible to find a boyfriend or a husband in this sort of place.”

“I don’t see why that’s so important anyway,” Alicia blustered, her chin raised obstinately. “I see enough of boys with my brothers; I can’t think why I would ever need a boyfriend as well.”

“You’ll think differently when you’re Potty’s age,” Sally said wisely. “We’re only young now. It’ll be years and years before we have to think about that sort of thing.”

“My mother says that she and my father met when she was only nineteen,” Darrell contributed, her brows lowered in a worried frown. “That’s not so terribly far away.”

Turning, Gwendoline scowled into her pillow. She couldn’t imagine any boy wanting to marry Darrell, with her fiery temper and excitable ways. According to her governess, Miss Winter, boys much preferred cultured and pretty girls such as herself.

Lying in bed, with the chatter of the other girls surrounding her almost as snugly as her bedclothes were, Gwendoline found it hard to imagine why it mattered very much what boys preferred. They were as foreign to her as the French towns and countryside so often talked about by the Mam’zelles, and Gwendoline felt quite sure that she wanted to keep it that way.

“I don’t like boys very much,” Mary-Lou admitted, almost as if she were reading Gwendoline’s thoughts. She glanced apologetically at Alicia. “I’m sure it’s lovely to have brothers like you do, Alicia, but I really don’t know what to say to a boy, I’m afraid. They’re always so loud and so rough that I can’t help but be a little scared by them.”

“You’re scared of everything, Mary-Lou,” Darrell pointed out good-naturedly, “so it’s not very surprising that you’re scared of boys as well.”

Gwendoline closed her eyes so that she couldn’t see the other girls any more, pulling her blankets a little higher so that she could hide an amused smile. The others thought so little of Mary-Lou at times, and yet she considered them all her friends anyway. Gwendoline felt quite sure that she could never be so eager to accept whatever mild acknowledgement might be cast her way. There were more important things in life than gaining the friendship of girls who would never fully appreciate her worth.

“I’m only scared of girls when I have a reason to be,” Mary-Lou argued, her voice a little less confident now that she had been forced to disagree with her beloved friend. “I’m not scared of _you_ , Darrell. I don’t think I could ever be.”

Although Gwendoline’s eyes were tightly closed, she did not need to look at Mary-Lou to be able to picture the expression on her face. She worshipped Darrell shamelessly, and rarely did so much as look in the other girl’s direction without a light pink blush colouring her cheek and a sparkle of insipid admiration adding a feverish glint to her eyes. Gwendoline was quite sure that she wouldn’t be at all surprised if little Mary-Lou decided one day that it was Darrell, and not boys at all, who she was truly interested in.

Biting her lip to prevent a loud giggle from escaping her throat, Gwendoline was not able to quell the shaking of her shoulders quite so easily. Even beneath the bulk of the bedclothes, her amusement was obvious.

“What’s wrong, Gwendoline?” Alicia said suddenly, her voice hard. “Do you despise us so much that you can’t sleep for shaking?”

The laugh that had been threatening to burst from Gwendoline’s chest subsided almost immediately. “Perhaps if you would stop your deafening chatter for a moment, I might have a chance of falling asleep,” she replied stiffly, annoyed that she had betrayed herself with something so silly as a giggle. 

“I hate to say it, but she’s right.” Once again, Katherine’s voice rose above the others. “It’s time we were all in bed. If Miss Potts catches us sitting here talking when we’re meant to be fast asleep, we may well be given an Order Point for our rowdiness.”

The girls rarely disobeyed Katherine’s requests as head of the dormy. Within a couple of minutes, everyone was in bed, with the lights out and moonlight creeping around the edges of the curtains. The silence was broken only by the sound of breathing, the gentle patter of rain on the windowpanes and the occasional whisper from one of the girls.

Gwendoline tried to stay awake, determined to fume for a few more minutes about the hatefulness of the others, but it had been a long and tiring day and it wasn’t very long at all before she was fast asleep, her hair falling in a golden sheet across her face.

* * * *

Gwendoline had endured a horrible day of lessons. She seemed to be even further behind than usual and both Miss Potts and Mam’zelle Rougier had spoken sharply to her for daydreaming in class, which had cast Gwendoline into a sulk of such proportions that she had been quite speechless all the way through supper. The other girls had not let her temper go unnoticed and eventually, tired of their comments and smirks, she decided to retire early in order to escape their attention.

Distracted as she was by the day’s indignities, Gwendoline had changed into her nightclothes and untied her hair before she realised that she was not alone in the dormy. It was only when she turned to fetch her hairbrush from the dresser that she noticed that she was not the only girl to go to bed early that night. At the furthermost window stood Mary-Lou, her hands resting lightly on the windowsill as she stared, entranced, into the darkness. 

Mary-Lou had remained as motionless as a rock when Gwendoline had entered the room, her slim body half obscured by the deep folds of the curtain beside which she stood. She had always blended easily into shadows and furniture and the other girls often forgot that she was around when it came to whispered secrets and private conversations. Gwendoline was particularly unobservant when it came to the people around her, too involved her own thoughts and opinions to bother much with the comings and goings of her schoolmates, so it was not unusual for Mary-Lou to go unnoticed in such a manner.

Of course, once Gwendoline caught sight of Mary-Lou staring out of the window in such a peculiar fashion, curiosity made it quite impossible for her to ignore the other girl any longer. Confident that her questions would be welcomed, she moved quickly to Mary-Lou’s side, shaking out her hair so that it swung around her shoulders as she walked. “What are you looking at?” she demanded, poking Mary-Lou roughly in the arm.

Mary-Lou jumped, her breath escaping from her throat in a shaky gasp, and turned to glare accusingly at Gwendoline. “Don’t creep up on me like that,” she implored, her eyes wide and watery. “You nearly scared me half to death.”

“It wouldn’t be hard,” Gwendoline replied cruelly, unimpressed by Mary-Lou’s skittish ways. 

“True.” Unconcerned, Mary-Lou turned back to the window, her breath still a little ragged.

“You didn’t answer my question.” Frowning, Gwendoline squinted into the indigo shadows beyond the window, trying to make out anything of interest in the school grounds below. 

“Remember Miss Potts’ mystery caller?”

Gwendoline shrugged. “Of course.”

“Look.” Mary-Lou pointed towards the middle of the windowpane, her finger pressing against the glass.

Moving a little closer, Gwendoline followed the line of the other girl’s gesture, peering into the night. For a while, she could not see anything out of the ordinary, her eyes taking time to adjust to the darkness. She was just beginning to wonder whether Mary-Lou might have been imagining it all when a slight movement on the ground below caught her gaze.

Sure enough, there was a couple standing almost directly below the dormy window. The shadow of the North Tower obscured most of the details of their faces, but Gwendoline recognised Miss Potts almost immediately, so familiar was she with the lines of her figure and the unimaginative way in which she did her hair. The other shadowed figure was that of a stranger, as far as Gwendoline could tell in the fragile light cast by the moon. He was almost a full foot taller than Miss Potts and very broad, with light hair that stood out against the darkness.

“It must be Miss Potts’ boyfriend,” Mary-Lou whispered, her cheeks pink with excitement. “Who else could it be, at this time of night?”

“It could be anyone,” Gwendoline argued, more to be contrary than through any real conviction. “He might be the father of one of the other girls.”

Mary-Lou laughed and shook her head. “I’ve never seen Miss Potts so intimate with any of the parents. Look – they’re holding hands, see?”

It was hard to deny the logic in Mary-Lou’s argument. Gwendoline opened her mouth to comment, before closing it without uttering so much as a syllable. Looking at the couple on the ground below, it was hard to imagine that they might be anything but sweethearts. Even as she watched, Miss Potts raised a hand to touch the man’s face, the dark leather of her kid glove covering the pale glow of his cheek. A peculiar, twisting sensation filled Gwendoline’s chest and she had to look away, annoyed with herself for being jealous of a simple gesture. 

Beside her, Mary-Lou exhaled softly, a sighed “oh” of disappointment that only barely carried to Gwendoline’s ears. “I think he’s leaving,” she said sadly. 

Gwendoline forced herself to turn back to the scene beneath the window, watching in masochistic horror as the stranger bent to kiss Miss Potts, their shadowy figures blending into one misshapen silhouette as he wrapped an arm around her waist. After a moment, they parted, and he raised a hand in a gesture of goodbye before turning and walking down the path that led towards the front gates.

“It must be wonderful to be kissed like that,” Mary-Lou whispered, watching as Miss Potts disappeared into the shadows at the base of the tower. 

“Do you think so?” Gwendoline wasn’t quite so sure. She thought it must be a nice feeling to be thoroughly adored, but found it hard to imagine being wrapped in a man’s sturdy embrace. “Men are awfully… loud.”

Mary-Lou smiled as she met Gwendoline’s gaze. “I know what you mean.”

Gwendoline remained quiet for a while, thinking about the scene they had witnessed and the unfamiliar strength of Mary-Lou’s words. She wasn’t usually a particularly perceptive girl but, all of a sudden, she felt quite positive that she understood Mary-Lou completely. 

“Does it bother you that Sally is Darrell’s special friend?” she asked bluntly, her gaze fixed keenly on Mary-Lou’s face.

Mary-Lou didn’t seem at all surprised by the apparent change of subject. “Not usually,” she replied mildly, her expression barely changing.

Gwendoline persisted. “But you wish that she could care more for you than she does.” Her words were an accusation, thinly veiled by the sickly-sweet tone of her voice.

Mary-Lou smiled, the gesture fragile and insignificant in the shadowy dormy. “I’m proud to be Darrell’s friend,” she said softly, her eyes fixed firmly on Gwendoline’s face. “I wouldn’t dream of asking for more.”

Gwendoline frowned. “How can you ever be happy with that?” she asked, feeling as though Mary-Lou’s answer was the most important thing in the world.

“It’s something.” Shrugging, Mary-Lou moved away from the window, touching Gwendoline’s arm in a brief gesture of solidarity. “Surely that’s better than nothing at all.”

Gwendoline thought about the months she had spent at Malory Towers and the nights she had lain awake in her bed, missing her mother and her home and wishing for the sort of friendships that came so easily to the other girls. The frown froze upon her face as a horrible feeling of emptiness swelled within her stomach, overwhelming and sickening and impossible to ignore. “You’re a fool, Mary-Lou,” she snapped, her voice tight and brittle. “It’ll never be enough.”

Mary-Lou flinched and stepped backwards slightly. “It has to be,” she replied softly, then turned her back on Gwendoline, busying herself with filling one of the washbasins with warm, soapy water, the rigid set of her shoulders suggesting that she did not want to continue the conversation any further.

Gwendoline’s arm burnt where Mary-Lou’s fingers had lingered warmly against her flesh. Feeling small and fragile and not very important at all, she walked to her bed without speaking again, sliding beneath the blankets and pressing her cheek to the cool softness of her pillow. Closing her eyes, she listened to the splash of water on porcelain as Mary-Lou prepared for bed. “It isn’t,” she whispered finally, quiet enough that Mary-Lou couldn’t hear to disagree. Her voice trembled.

When the other girls flooded the dormy, only minutes later, Gwendoline pretended to be asleep. It was easier that way.

**15th June 2003**


End file.
